Café review: Baby Yolk

On May 22, 2026May 21, 2026 By ediblereadingIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Alexandra Langlais, the owner of Insta-friendly Erleigh Road institution Café Yolk has had a busy twelve months. In January she opened Donnington Deli opposite Yolk’s original branch in a spot formerly occupied by a car dealership, offering huge deli-style sandwiches with a free cold drink thrown in (or, if you’re cynical, a cold drink you might not want priced in). I went the morning they opened and, perhaps peevishly, was disappointed that they weren’t a deli and didn’t serve coffee; I wandered off to have an enjoyable brunch at Monty’s instead.

The deli thing was probably an overreaction – nobody criticises Calcot’s Avenue Deli, after all, for not being a deli – and I’m reliably informed that Donnington Deli has finally put coffee on the menu. But I ate there a couple of times in quick succession in its opening month and, despite being impressed with the handsome fit out, it wasn’t entirely my bag. Sometimes less is more, and Donnington Deli’s almost comically overstuffed and stodgy focaccias didn’t do it for me; the prevalence of turkey, surely everybody’s least favourite meat, on the menu was also a bit of a curveball.

I’ll be back at some point once it’s settled in to try Donnington Deli again but the place was doing a roaring trade and doesn’t need any help from me either way: Langlais clearly knows exactly what she’s doing, understands her market and is expanding her business in a careful, considered way, staying close to a community she knows well. It’s mind-blowing, really, to think that Café Yolk traded solidly for over 10 years before it even considered branching out.

The more interesting development, for me, was Yolk’s actual second branch, colloquially known as Baby Yolk, which opened on Cemetery Junction last July. It was a deliberately stripped-back sequel to its older sibling, with a far narrower menu and a greater emphasis on grab and go options. It particularly appealed to me because my favourite thing at Yolk was always the breakfast burger, and that’s what Baby Yolk has built its menu around.

But in that part of town, only open daytimes, Baby Yolk had proved challenging for me to get to for brunch or lunch, and it wasn’t clear how much capacity it had for eating in. Last week, with a rare Friday off, I found myself in that neck of the woods just in time for a late breakfast, so I decided it was a sign and made my way there to see how it measured up to the other establishments in the Yolk family.

I was reminded as I approached it that businesses don’t always prosper in this location. The spot where Smash N Grab used to be was now occupied by a South Indian business called Mallu Nest, but the little hut looked like it was being gutted and it wasn’t clear whether it would reopen as Mallu Nest or something else. And of course before that it spent something like a year being the preposterously named Cozzy Bites, a smash burger place whose menu was so similar to Smash N Grab’s that you wondered if the names of the burgers had formed part of the terms and conditions of sale.

Come to think of it, before Baby Yolk came out of its shell that site was Cemetery Junction hairdresser the Funky Barnet for over 20 years, which means that – lucky Yolk – their landlord is famous Reading philanthropist John Sykes. Let’s hope they get on better with Sykes than the Funky Barnet did, given that they notoriously went to the local paper during Covid to ensure his humane conduct reached a wider audience. All that and a busy charitable foundation too: let’s get Danyl Johnson to give that man a gold plated Pride Of Reading Lifetime Award!

Still, as long as Yolk keeps making money and avoiding any kind of global pandemic I’m sure they and their landlord will rub along nicely, until it comes time to renegotiate the rent at least. But can they do that in this little corner of the Junction? I got there just after 10am, and one customer was sitting in, although there was a steady trickle of both eat-in and takeaway customers during my time there.

I loved the interior and the way Baby Yolk was styled. From the sunshine-yellow awning and shopfront to the almost space-age white shelves, showcasing Yolk’s beans and reusable cups for sale, the colour scheme is clever and witty, is bright and pops. It’s rare that the interiors of Reading hospitality businesses look this coherent and thought through, and I really appreciated it. Baby Yolk was also far bigger than I expected inside, with a mixture of high and low tables, stools, chairs and bright yellow banquettes, probably seating about a dozen people. Outside a little terrace had room for half a dozen more, and could be lovely on a sunny day.

Baby Yolk’s menu keeps it simple: five “breakfast burgers”, although the pedants among us – okay, maybe just me – could argue about whether any of the ones that don’t involve a sausagemeat patty technically qualify as burgers at all. For meat eaters you can have either sausage and egg, bacon and egg or the holy trinity of all three, for vegetarians it means egg, cheese and avocado in a bun.

Vegans get the same thing, but with scrambled tofu subbed in for the egg: I had scrambled tofu once, in 2016, and have never sought to repeat the experience. Let’s just say it was a strange time in my life.

The entry level breakfast burgers are £7 each and costs rise from there to £8.90 for the vegan not-a-burger. There are various extras you can chuck in: some, like sauce and crispy onions, are free whereas others can add up to £3 to the end product. It felt a little unfair that the vegetarian and vegan options were the most expensive things on the menu, and it also doesn’t suggest Yolk is using the fanciest meat in their sandwiches.

The majority of the menu board was given over to a plethora of beverages: frappes, smoothies, iced drinks, teas, coffees, matcha and chai. There were also some baked goods up at the counter – muffins, cookies and the like – although their price wasn’t listed. A sausage and egg burger and a latte set me back £10.70, which felt pretty reasonable, and I nabbed a table in the bay window with a good view of the room. Five minutes later, my coffee and my foil-wrapped burger were in front of me.

The first thing to say about Baby Yolk’s breakfast burger is that despite what you might think it is not a McMuffin or even Fidget & Bob’s Kennet Island homage, the O’Muffin. Part of that is the obvious: it’s a bun, not a muffin. And part is because, instead of a fried egg, Baby Yolk tops its patty with a little omelette, as its elder sibling does. Less messy, and possibly a little less indulgent.

Unlike the breakfast burger at Café Yolk the egg here doesn’t make a break for it past the perimeter of the bun. But again, this is designed for convenience and eating on the go, not attacking at a table with cutlery to hand if you need it. I didn’t mind that, but the egg itself was underseasoned: it meant the rest of the burger had to do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting.

Similarly the patty was pleasant, if ever so slightly anaemic. When you have this dish on Erleigh Road there’s more caramelisation, more crisping of the edges. Here everything was a single texture, a perfectly pleasant spongey puck of sausagemeat which, again, could have done with more salt. All that makes it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, which is unfair: I did, and it was pretty much what I needed. But was it an upmarket reimagining of a Sausage & Egg McMuffin, or just a more expensive version in a nicer room?

What saved it, I suspect, were the extras. I’d gone for HP sauce and crispy onions and the latter in particular lifted and rescued what might otherwise have been a tad workmanlike. The onions were those ones you bought in a tub, but in a thick carpet between the bun and the patty, playing off the brown sauce, they made each mouthful better. I munched away contentedly, enjoying my bay window seat and watching the comings and goings of this interesting little café. Something about its simplicity, its deliberate lack of range, appealed to me: after all, the one thing Gordon Ramsay and restaurant critics have in common these days is a strongly held conviction that menus should not try to do too much.

When I reviewed Cafe Yolk last, nearly 5 years ago, a big draw was that they had started buying coffee from Anonymous Coffee. Then they binned it off, presumably on cost grounds, and used Kingdom Coffee instead: I discovered this one sad afternoon when my takeaway latte tasted worse than one you could have picked up from Costa or Nero.

It’s unclear whether Yolk have stuck with Kingdom or even if they now get their own branded coffee roasted by someone else: although I saw their canary-coloured bags on those white shelves I didn’t go over to investigate, and it’s not clear whether they were for sale or for display only. Whoever Baby Yolk get its coffee from, I was delighted to find that it was a really serviceable, smooth latte without bitterness: a tall, generous one too for £3.70, which is pretty much the going rate for a latte nearly anywhere right now.

It is also, with the possible exception of Monty’s, the only place even vaguely in East Reading that does a latte worth ordering. The residents of New Town are quite lucky, I would say. The commuters of New Town, too, as Baby Yolk opens at 7am. The coffee was so nice, and the spot so welcoming, that I stayed longer than I intended to, nursing my coffee and cursing my bad luck that even I couldn’t justify a research-focused piece of cake at 10.30am.

It’s typical that perhaps Yolk’s most unsung move turns out to be my favourite. Baby Yolk opened last year to a comparative lack of fanfare, and significantly less comment and interest than Donnington Deli attracted less than six months later. But for what it’s worth, of all three of Yolk’s outposts Baby Yolk was the one I enjoyed most. It got everything right: I liked the concept, loved the design and enjoyed the execution.

It’s not a menu with much in the way of replay value, which might prove to be a limiting factor longer term, but it may have just enough. Also, like all of Alexandra Langlais’ businesses, it is not so concerned about getting Reading residents to cross town, as I did, to go there. It is very much targeted at its community and that community is lucky to have someone living in it who has the drive and the vision to make it a better place in which to eat and drink, whatever your preferences might be.

Yolk’s website states “Please note our Baby Yolk location is takeaway only” and they ought to change that, because it might deter people from doing what I did, wandering over on the off-chance and having a really pleasant, tranquil time watching the world go by, both inside and outside the café, the comings and goings of one of my favourite little pockets of the Ding.

Sadly Reading Old Cemetery is still closed, but my breakfast reminded me of all my happy lockdown wanderings there in the summer of 2020, a lifetime ago. If Baby Yolk had been open back then I have no doubt I would have perched outside afterwards with a coffee, or taken one with me and drunk it by the war memorial. I thought of my friend Graeme, who can practically walk past Baby Yolk on his commute to work, and simultaneously felt jealous and happy for him.

It also made me miss my old house in the Village, a short walk from Baby Yolk, and all the working from home lunches I wouldn’t get to enjoy. Truth be told, it made me slightly begrudge living in Katesgrove, which could badly do with a place like this: good luck finding a drinkable latte round there. Still, Reading as a whole is better for this kind of spot, and I just hope they spring up in some of its other unsung or underserved barrios.

Until then, it’s better that a café like this is somewhere, anywhere, rather than nowhere. A rising tide lifts all boats, and we have to hope that Cafe Yolk’s flurry of activity in the last year might serve as a blueprint for other imaginative entrepreneurs. Until then, East Reading is the lucky part. As this review goes to print we’re about to experience our first true heatwave of the year, but even without that Baby Yolk is doing a decent job of making Cemetery Junction the sunny side of town.

Baby Yolk – 7.3
14 Wokingham Road, Reading, RG6 1JG
0118 3131128

https://www.cafeyolk.com

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Café review: The Switch

On September 2, 2022September 28, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews3 Comments

You’ll find many people who live in Reading that love the river. The waterways that run through and bisect Reading define it in so many ways, whether it’s the feeling of elsewhere you get when you cross the water and head north into Caversham, the brilliant, slightly wild seclusion of View Island, the experience of enjoying an al fresco pint outside the Fisherman’s Cottage seeing the world go past or even just watching the infamous Caversham Princess wending its merry, noisy way past the Bohemian Bowls Club, itself situated on Fry’s Island, slap bang in the middle of the Thames.

In lockdown I became a bit of an aficionado, strolling down the river past Caversham Bridge and looking enviously at the houses on the opposite bank, wandering round Caversham Court Gardens and watching the river flow or even just having a quick amble across the Horseshoe Bridge before the sun went down. On a particularly clement day I did the thing I always told myself I should and schlepped all the way along the riverbank to beautiful, traffic-clogged Sonning. Walking through the church yard, the pub just round the corner, it felt nothing like Reading at all. It’s true: we are very lucky indeed that our town is situated at the confluence of the Kennet and the Thames.

But all that said, for me the greatest tributary in this town has always been the number 17 bus route, the grand thoroughfare that cuts through Reading from east to west. I’ve always thought that there’s an almost infinite variety to that bus route, the distinctive purple double decker starting at the Three Tuns in the east, gliding past the prosperous houses off the Wokingham Road, running alongside Palmer Park and darting across the iconic snarl of Cemetery Junction, snaking through town, past the library and the Broad Street Mall.

Then it makes its way down the Oxford Road, through all that bustle and life, the skleps and the biryani joints, the barbers and the Indian sweet shops, the stalls on the pavement groaning with fruit and veg. And at the roundabout just past the KFC, it veers left and meanders through Tilehurst, finishing up at the water tower, another of Reading’s most distinctive structures. In east Reading the gas tower has played host to its last birds, and there’s an eerie emptiness about the space where it once stood, but in west Reading they still have their landmark, beautiful and graceful as ever.

People used to talk about how you could do a pub crawl along the 17 bus route. And of course you can, if you have a burning desire to drink at The Roebuck, The Palmer Tavern, The Outlook, The Wishing Well and the Pond House. Good luck with that, if it’s your bag. But for me, the 17 bus route more represents an incredibly rich seam of excellent places to eat and drink, all of them dead easy to reach on a bus which runs pretty much every seven minutes.

If you live anywhere near that bus route, you can get to all of these: Cakes & Cream; Tutu’s Ethiopian Kitchen; O Português; Smash N Grab; The Lyndhurst; House Of Flavours; Blue Collar Corner; The Nag’s Head; Buon Appetito; Oishi; Dee Caf and even Double-Barrelled. Who needs the Thames anyway? The number 17’s charms might be a little more rugged and raw than wafting down the river, but I know which is more accessible. More useful too, come to think of it.

The subject of this week’s review is almost right at the western end of the 17 route: The Switch is the Tilehurst café on The Triangle, in the heart of Tilehurst Village. And alighting from the bus on a Sunday morning the first thing that struck me was that the place was packed. There was no danger of me breaking the news of The Switch to the waiting Reading world: that ship had sailed, and it didn’t look remotely like a café in desperate need of another positive review.

Café review: Monty’s Café

On August 27, 2021September 23, 2025 By ediblereadingIn Reviews2 Comments

At the end of our lunch at Monty’s Café, the owner came over to our table with a little plate for my friend Jerry and me. It had a little macaroon and a baklava on it, a neat touch. So I asked him how long they’d been open, and he said that it was just about two years. And, as so often lately, I thought about what a gruelling two years that must have been for him. I thought that the summer of 2019 would have seemed so full of hope, because the beginning of things is always exciting. And the following winter might have been challenging, as winters often are, but then suddenly, as spring was almost around the corner the bombshell dropped that nothing would be normal again for a very long time.

Q&A: Naomi Lowe, Nibsy’s

On April 21, 2020November 25, 2021 By ediblereadingIn InterviewsLeave a comment

Naomi Lowe set up Nibsy’s, Reading’s first dedicated gluten-free café, in Cross Street in 2014, following a career in investment management. Over seven years the café went from strength to strength, remaining Reading’s only venue specifically catering to this sector of the market and winning the Reading Retail Award for Best Café in 2017. Naomi sold the café to new owners YayLo in July 2021, who have continued to run it as a gluten free business, and her first book of recipes came out in November 2021. She lives with her husband and two children off the Oxford Road.

What are you missing most while we’re all in lockdown?
Losing my “rhythm” and not being able to see my mum.

What’s the biggest difference you notice between corporate life and running a café?
Corporate life was easy. Running a coffee shop takes a lot more out of me (but gives back, too). I could go on about the differences and sacrifices I’ve had to make, but the reward and the team, the people and the sense of achievement are worth the effort.

What’s your favourite thing about Reading?
The Oxford Road – it feels like home. And I like that Reading is big enough to feel anonymous but small enough to have a sense of community.

What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten?
I feel like I should say L’Ortolan as it was the most expensive and memorable meal (it was a birthday present). But the happy memories are of when I used to grab a bag of chips from Smarts fish and chip shop in Henley and sit by the river with my boyfriend, now husband. They were consistently the best chips I’ve ever eaten. I don’t think they are run by the same people anymore.

What was your most embarrassing moment?
I’ve been calling a regular customer Martin for five years. He recently started following our Instagram page and it turns out his name is Tom. I’ll put that right when we re-open.

What’s your earliest memory of food?
Eating digestive biscuits in bed, which my mum would bring me as a late night snack when I was a toddler.

How do you relax?
With a smoke and glass of wine, in the garden.

You opened Nibsy’s six years ago. How much do you think the food scene has changed for the gluten intolerant since then?
Massively changed for the better – it’s rare to go out and not have a few decent options.

Where will you go for your first meal out after lockdown?
Probably Pho. There’s one dish that I always have – the vermicelli noodles with mushroom and tofu. I don’t eat out very often, and am a sucker for sticking to what I like. Plus, I am comfortable eating there on my own: as I get older, “me time” is like gold.

What is your favourite word?
Tricky, but the first two words that come to mind are “bobble” and “yes”. Sorry, these are pretty random! But I’ll explain: “bobble” because it sounds like a happy word. And “yes” because it was the first word I ever said, and is generally a positive word.

What one film can you watch over and over again?
I suppose I’d have to say E.T. because it’s the film I’ve watched more than any other. Although my seven year old is watching Ratatouille on repeat at the moment and I love it: the story, the music, and the message “anyone can cook”. That’s nice to hear while I’m writing the recipe book. Series wise, the one I have watched twice is Breaking Bad: nothing else has come close.

Who are your biggest influences in the world of food and drink?
John Richardson, because of the knowledge he shares in his help books for coffee shop and café owners, and Gordon Ramsay because I love Kitchen Nightmares.

Where is your happy place?
At my mum’s little place in north-west London or my dad’s, in the south of France in a sleepy village called Auzas. Nothing happens there, the church bell rings every hour – even through the night – but the calm and fresh air is like nothing else. And he makes a great curry and plays his old vinyl.

Normally I ask people what their favourite crisps are. What’s your favourite gluten-free snack?
No, crisps ARE my go-to snack. My favourite brand is the special large bag of salt and vinegar ones that the Co-op do – I love these because they are so salty and vinegary. Otherwise, a specifically gluten-free snack would be the granola bars that we make and sell at the coffee shop.

What is the worst job you’ve done?
A temp job in my early twenties, in a virtually windowless building just off Oxford Street. I answered calls and filled in job sheets for engineers to fix faulty toilets and equipment. I was mostly on my own, which was the worst part. I only stuck at it a week or two.

What is your most unappealing habit?
I wanted to ask my husband for help on this one. He said “screaming at your husband.”

What’s your guiltiest pleasure when it comes to food?
Late night scoops of crunchy peanut butter before bed.

Who would play you in the film of your life?
Having racked my brain, there’s only one actress that springs to mind – Julia Stiles.

Tell us something people might not know about you.
I’m distantly related to Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula.

Describe yourself in three words.
Warm, pragmatic, thinker.

Bakery House

On August 14, 2015April 21, 2024 By ediblereadingIn Reviews18 Comments

Click here to read a more recent review of Bakery House, from July 2023.

All of the new openings in Reading lately have felt very fashionable, very on-trend. From the sleek space of CAU to the white walls and industrial chic of Manhattan Coffee Club, from the street food – if you believe a word of it – of Wolf to the forthcoming lunchtime sushi of Itsu, it feels like Reading is starting to get restaurants and cafés which reflect how people like to eat at the moment (well, people in London anyway).

All of these places have got plenty of exposure in the local websites, and there’s been a hubbub of excitement about them (and they keep coming – C.U.P. opens at the end of the month too, in a spot just along from Bill’s). But the place that’s most intrigued me lately isn’t any of the glossy town centre re-fits: it’s Bakery House, a Lebanese restaurant which has opened up the hill on London Street, where Nepalese restaurant Khukuri previously plied its (somewhat unremarkable, I’m afraid) trade for many, many years.

It’s a funny place for a restaurant: all the action seems to be at the bottom of the street, where RISC and Great Expectations make for long-standing neighbours. After that it’s all barbers, language schools and a couple of fried chicken joints, presumably to offer sustenance to people about to enter or leave the Stygian pleasure palace that is the Legendary After Dark Club (another place for which the term use it or lose it feels extremely apt). But I kept getting good reports of Bakery House, and I became increasingly curious – if only to try somewhere new where neither the light bulbs nor the brickwork were exposed.

And yes, there’s none of that palaver going on at Bakery House. The restaurant has the grill at the front and the dining room at the back, clearly with an eye on capturing some takeaway trade late at night (the menu offers a range of shawarmas and other sandwiches, easily portable and far more appealing than the dubious delights of Chicken Base at the bottom of the hill).

The dining room, containing just ten tables, has tasteful battleship grey tiles and lightboxes on the walls with pictures in them which, surreally, appear to have little to do with the Lebanon. One is of a beach with palm trees, seemingly in the Caribbean. Another shows the windmills of Mykonos in the background and, err, a bowl of Greek salad in the foreground. A third is of a veritable explosion of tropical fruit. Despite that, it’s a nice space – and the mirrored wall at the back does a good job of bringing in light and the illusion of depth.

It’s a pleasing menu, too – a good range of hot and cold mezze, Lebanese pizzas, hot dishes straight off the charcoal grill or from the kitchen out the back. I was sceptical about the name Bakery House, but there is clearly baking going on – you can see the big oven, the pittas rising in the wooden racks on the back wall. They brought us some while we made up our minds and they were lovely fluffy circles, just right dipped in the intensely garlicky sauce or its slightly piquant chilli sibling.

The falafel were probably the best I’ve had in this country and a minor miracle in themselves. You got four for three pounds fifty and the texture of them was spectacular – no stodge, just a deceptively light inside and an almost perfect thin, crunchy exterior. They made me angry at all the crimes against falafel committed by every supermarket’s sandwich aisle. Studded with sesame seeds, they were stunning dipped in the tahini sauce they came with, a silky, intense distillation of everything good about houmous with none of the accompanying clag. I also quite liked the salty, sharp pickled vegetables which came with them (purple, no less) but they were definitely a good thing you could have too much of.

I wanted to try something from the bakery section too, and I was tempted by many of the small Lebanese pizzas. I ended up going for kallaj bil jiben and it too was a thing of wonder – a thin, translucent disc of Lebanese bread, the texture almost like a crepe, the inside smeared with spice and stuffed with halloumi, cut into quarters. Beautifully light, salty yet subtle, and stonking value at just over three pounds. When I’d arrived at about seven o’clock on a weekday night, the restaurant was already half full. By the time our mains courses arrived there wasn’t an empty table in there, with a steady stream of people turning up for takeway. I could well understand why, based on what I’d already eaten.

The mains were equally keenly priced, with very few of them costing much more than ten pounds. This is where I’d like to tell you how delicious the farouj massahab, the boneless chargrilled baby chicken is – sadly, I can’t, because they brought me the farrouj meshwi (the same thing, but with bones in) instead. I asked if there had been some mistake and almost immediately they offered to redo it or leave it with me and take it off the bill. No complaints, no grumbling, no making me feel like I was being awkward – just an apology and quick action. Figurative hats off.

In the interests of eating at the same time as my companion, I went for the latter option and it was so delicious that I felt guilty about not paying for the dish. Granted, it was a faff – the plate was nowhere near big enough to strip the chicken off the part-jointed carcass tidily – but the chicken made up for that. Everything was how you’d want it: the skin moreish with crackle and char, the meat underneath tender and tasty. Every turn of a joint found an undiscovered shard of crispy skin or a beautiful seam of unmined chicken, and every turn brought another smile.

The accompaniments I could have taken or left – the rice was an anonymous yellow basmati with what looked like bits of frozen vegetables, the coleslaw could have been from anywhere, those strange purple pickles again – but complaining about that would be like going to see Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and criticising some of the extras in the crowd scenes. The chicken was the star, and I knew it.

The other dish, shish taouk, was simple and effective: cubes of lightly spiced chicken cooked on a skewer with a pile of salad, coleslaw and yet more purple pickles. The outside of the meat was just charred and although the flavours weren’t as good as you’d find at La Courbe, Reading’s other Lebanese restaurant (where the chicken is all soft and fragranced with ginger) it was soon pepped up with the additional of some garlic sauce (so sweet! so dirty!). I’m pretty sure the chips were out of a bag but they were none the worse for that – and, as it happens, perfect dipped in the tahini sauce. The main let-down, really, was the tabbouleh. I had high hopes, especially after the starters, but it didn’t live up to the rest, with just too much pulpy tomato and not enough pizazz.

Bakery House doesn’t have a licence, so the drinks options are a range of soft drinks and fresh juices. I tried the fresh apple juice and I loved it – the sweet, green, concentrated taste of apple without any of that sour sharpness of a supermarket carton. It was terrific, although I was struck by the irony that, at three pounds, it cost almost as much as either of the starters.

Service was friendly and pleasant, although I felt they were still finding their feet and I got that impression from neighbouring tables too. I really liked my waitress’ disarming honesty – I asked her how to pronounce one of the dishes and she said “I don’t know, I’m from Romania” (I’d pick that over a bullshitter, any day). The whole bill for two starters, one main, a tabbouleh and a couple of soft drinks came to just over twenty-five pounds, not including service. When I tried to tip – because I felt bad about having such good chicken for free – the waitress tried to talk me out of it. When I left the owner told me I shouldn’t have tipped and gave me a little box of baklava (which, incidentally, were terrific the next day). How can you not at least slightly love a place like that?

Bakery House is by no means perfect. The layout is a bit odd: most of the tables seat two but have a third chair, like a spare part, at right angles, so I think a table for three or four could feel a bit crowded (there are a couple of tables properly suited to four people though, tucked away in the corners). The service is charming but erratic, although they might just be struggling with being so busy so soon. The dining room was verging on the Baltic, which I think was a combination of some aggressive air conditioning and leaving the front door open to try to be more attractive to passing trade.

Despite all that, it probably won’t surprise you that Bakery House is emphatically my kind of place. Perhaps I’m out of step with the rest of Reading, but I was much more comfortable in that unfussy, unpretentious room enjoying my food (and, I suspect, being in the company of fellow diners with exactly the same priorities) than I’ll ever be sitting at some faux reclaimed steel table eating “artisan produce” that has never been near an artisan because there’s no such thing as a bloody artisan any more. So I’m prepared to overlook the occasional misstep and I think I’ll rejoice in the fact that I, and Bakery House, are as far from cool as it’s possible to be (except for the overpowering air conditioning, of course). That said, I’m not sure whether Bakery House takes reservations and at this rate people will soon be queuing to get in: maybe being untrendy will turn out to be the new food trend after all. You heard it here first.

Bakery House – 7.5
82 London Street, RG1 4SJ
0118 3274040

http://bakeryhouse.co/

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